On today’s DB2Night Show, we had the second set of competitors who are competing in the DB2 has Talent Competition. This week we had 6 amazing competitors who made it difficult for we judges (Martin Hubel, Klaas Brant, and I) to choose who would move on to the finals.

Before I tell you who was chosen to move on as a result of this episode, let me tell you a bit about all the competitors.

Vijay’s presentation was titled “Keeping Critical OLTP Databases Up and Running”. Vijay’s primary tip was to gather data when your database is running well and at peak. Having this data available will help you decipher problems when the database is running slower than it should. I’m reading the book “Switch” right now and one of the things the authors recommend that people do in their every day life is to look at the bright spots… that is, analyze a situation that goes well and find out why so that you can repeat it. It seems to me that Vijay’s presentation was suggesting that people do just that. Well done.

Mustafa presented “Consolidating Three Databases into One”. Mustafa ran out of time… but only by a few minutes. It seemed that the last couple of slides were critical to the presentation, but as it was, it was difficult to follow. Klaas gave Mustafa some advice to improve and I think that the presentation would be much better once Mustafa takes Klaas’ advice.

Ahmad was next with the presentation “OLTP Queries Timing Out”. Ahmad gave a very creative solution for searching for character strings in a table. He showed how he brought the search costs down significantly in his query. After Ahmad presented, both Klaas and Martin mentioned that they have many customers who were looking for solutions to this common problem.

Sameer presented “Optimizing Application Performance and Performance Monitoring”. This presentation was filled with incredible tips. Many incredible tips. The only thing I wanted to see in addition to what Sameer provided was examples and what if scenarios as to why these tips should be used and why they are better. Sameer says that he had a much bigger slide deck with that kind of content, but cut it out to fit in the 4 minutes he was allotted.

Greg’s presentation “Want to Improve Your DB2 Availability” was A++ on the definitions of HADR and HACMP, but there weren’t enough examples and pictures, so people with short attention spans, such as me, had trouble following. With a bit more effort, Greg’s presentation would have taken him to the finals.

Raja was last today. Presentation: “A Miss is as good as a Mile”. Did I get the title right? It doesn’t seem to make sense to me right now. Raja very nicely laid out problems related to performance and came up with solutions and clear details on how to get from problem to solution.

So, who did we choose? We decided that we liked Raja’s and Ahmad’s presentations best of all and asked the two of them to come back in March. We also decided to invite Sameer back next week to give us his presentation again next Friday after he takes the advice that he was given in this week’s show.

Did you miss this episode or last weeks? No worries! These are recorded and you can watch the replay. You’ll be glad that you did. One of the polling questions that we had today asked the audience if they learned something in today’s show that they didn’t yet know. 93% of the audience responded saying that they did in fact learn something valuable in the show. Even if you are an experienced DBA, I would say that you could learn something from these shows. The creativity of the people on the front line are amazingly creative!